Series

Antonioni x 6

August 22 to August 29

Take it or leave it, modern cinema as we know it is divided into BA and AA: Before Antonioni and After Antonioni. While Michelangelo Antonioni had been developing his shockingly new architectonic screen grammar for over a decade, it was 1960’s L’Avventura which was his watershed moment, a beautiful and terrible vision of creeping anhedonia amidst glossy prosperity in contemporary Italy, a world in which the human form now found itself dwarfed, menaced, and rendered irrelevant by an environment invested with a sense of ambient threat. His name would later be slapped on any stereotyped depiction of urban ennui, but his rigor, sui generis brilliance, and austere beauty are impossible to reproduce.